


Just A Game

by pinesbrosfalls (fangirl0430)



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: BORD HAS A GUN, Gen, Guns, Possession, Threats of Violence, bord
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-23 20:33:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16625957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fangirl0430/pseuds/pinesbrosfalls
Summary: Based onthis comic, in which Bord has a gun, and Stan has a difficult choice to make.





	Just A Game

“You know, you almost had me fooled.”

The air is colder down here, in the basement. He’s not sure how that’s even possible. Up in the house, curled up next to Ford’s little space heater, the chill still cut down to the bone, left his teeth chattering and his toes numb.

During the trip down the elevator, he swore he could feel the air shift. Damp earth cutting off whatever moonlight could filter through the snow-laden clouds to peer in the house’s windows, the air still and unyielding, stinging his throat with every breath in and burning his cheeks, his hands shoved deep in his pockets to find any last shred of heat.

Ford had said it helped keep him awake.

Obviously, it’s not enough.

He breathes out, the last bit of warmth lingering in the air like a breath of cigarette smoke before disappearing into the dark.

Ford smiles.

Or more, Bill smiles with Ford’s face, facial muscles pulling tight in all the wrong places and to a painful extent, like he just grabbed them all at once and _pulled_ , lips unnaturally taunt against his teeth.

His eyes glint yellow in the dim lighting of the basement.

“’Almost’?” Bill asks, cocking his head slightly.

It’s not the first time he’s found himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

Not even the first time he’s found himself looking down the barrel of _his own_ gun.

His hands come up. Slowly, like he’s had to do on one too many occasions. Palms eye-level, an acknowledgement that the other person has the upper hand, a refusal to give them any satisfaction of the fear they want. Neutral territory. A last grip on whatever is left of his dignity and resolve.

 “Yeah,” Stan says. “See, the biggest thing you have going against you is that it doesn’t take some fancy science degree to tell when my brother is being possessed by a goddamn demon. You’re not subtle, and I’m not an idiot _._ ”

“That’s funny. Sixer seems to think otherwise.”

“Not the same idiot kid he thinks I am.”

“ _Right_ ,” Bill says. “I forgot Stan Pines died a long time ago. Who are you now? Hal? Stetson? Andrew? You know, the fact that you went by ‘Eight Ball’ at all is hilariou—”

“You maybe got a point?”

“All those years surviving off scraps, barely getting by, doing things you regret. I’ve seen your nightmares, Stanley. Pretty wild stuff in there, even by my standards.”

“And?”

“All that, and yet,” Bill’s head tips to the other side, the movement jerky and unnatural, though his hands are somehow perfectly steady, the gun still leveled at Stan’s chest, “you still followed me down here.”

The moment he caught the bastard digging through his stuff, he knew how this would go down.

“Cuz it’d be smarter to let you go off on your own with a gun?”

“Why not?” Bill says. “What’s the worst that can happen? Sixer here has a few extra fingers to spare.”

His right hand, with his finger on the trigger, stays in place. The left yanks back the slide and cocks the gun, aim unwavering.

_The slide latch is broken on that one._

_No way to tell if it’s loaded or not._

“And maybe a brother too.”

For the first time, Stan tries to remember how many bullets are in that gun.

“I might only severely maim you if you tell me where you hid that first Journal.”

_He nabbed that gun off one of Rico’s guys in Mexico when he first made a run for it. Ten round magazine. He knows he let off a few rounds during his escape._

“You’re bluffing.”

“You’re right. I’ll still kill you either way,” Cipher says, head still cocked uncomfortably to the side, grin still wide on Ford’s face. “Promise I’ll just shoot you in the head though. Less painful, so I’ve heard.”

_First shot was at the guy’s shoulder to disarm him. Second and third in Rico’s direction. Fourth and fifth shot as return fire hiding behind the mule-ing truck._

“But this threat is pretty dumb, considering I’m the only one who knows where the Journal is,” Stan says. “So, go ahead and shoot me. Then you’ll never see that book again.”

_Sixth and seventh when he made a run for it. Then it was two or three shots behind him while driving away in the Stanleymobile._

_Was it two or three?_

Cipher’s grin wavers before pulling tight again.

“You know, you’ve got yourself a point there,” he says. The gun lowers slightly, his head tilting even on his shoulders. “You know, Sixer here never gave you any credit. But I figured there was a bit of brain in that skull of yours. And because of that, I’ll ask one more time, Stanley Pines.”

The gun comes back up.

Only this time—

_Two or three? Two or three? Two or three?_

Bill points the gun at his own head.

At _Ford’s_ head.

_He remembers it, can practically hear the first two shots clear as day. But was there a third?_

_Why can’t he remember a third shot?_

“Where’s the Journal?”

“Woah hey now,” Stan says, his voice tight with his heart rammed up his throat and slamming in his ears. His body shifts forward on its own accord and immediately stumbles backwards again when he sees the wrong finger twitch next to the trigger. A warning. “Put the gun down.”

“Tell me where the Journal is, and I’ll think about it.”

_He thinks the safety is still on. Doesn’t know if Bill knows that._

_Doesn’t know if there’s still one bullet left in the barrel._

“You could _kill_ him, Bill.” Stan tries to rein it in, tries to get his composure back, to regain some semblance of control over the situation.

His eyes are glued on the barrel pressed against Ford’s temple.

His voice cracks.

“Put the gun back on me, then we can talk, alright?” Stan says. “He’s the smart one. I’m just the one who knows where the stupid book is. Put the gun back on me, then we’ll talk.”

“But you said it yourself, Stanley,” Bill chimes. “You’re the only one who knows where the book is, not Sixer here. I’ve got a perfectly good portal the next room over with no activation codes. I don’t _need_ this disposable meatbag you call a brother anymore. So, I could just,” he motions in a vague shooting gesture with the gun, blowing air out between his teeth to mimic a gunshot. “And there goes one problem I wouldn’t have to worry about anymore.”

“And also your only bargaining chip.”

“Oh, I’m sure I could find a few more. Pretty sure there’s a tiny human just the next house over who would _love_ to come meet you.”

_Two or three. Two or three._

“So, what are you gonna do now, Stanley Pines? Or should I make your decision easy and then see you again in a few hours?”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

There’s—

There’s a soft click, reverberating through the room like a gunshot itself.

He realizes Bill knew the safety was on.

He realizes a second later that it’s not on anymore.

“How much are you willing to prove that?”

_Two or three. Two or three._

“Look, we can talk,” Stan says. “Just. Get the gun away from his head, please.”

“I think I’m good.”

“ _Damnit_ this isn’t a game!” Stan snaps. “You have any idea how many people accidentally kill themselves doing this exact shit that you’re doing right now? Get the gun away from his head! This isn’t funny!”

“Oh no, this is _hilarious_ ,” Bill says through bared teeth, still grinning. “Just three days ago, you two are trying to beat the living tar out of each other down here, and now you’re afraid of me accidentally _shooting_ him? Make up your mind.”

“I was _mad_. I didn’t want him _dead_.”

“Eh. Same thing.”

_Two or three. Two or three._

_He slammed the brakes. BANG. Jerked the wheel to the right to swerve onto a side road. Weaved to avoid the fire from behind. Leaned out the window. BANG. BANG._

_Or was it just one BANG out the window?_

_Two shots or three? Two or three. Two or three? Two or—_

“I’m getting bored, so let’s speed this along a little, huh?” Bill says. “I’ll count down from three. You have until then to tell me where the Journal is, or I shoot good ole Fordsy here, alright?”

Stan’s blood runs cold, ice clogging in his veins and constricting his vision down to a singular point.

The place where the barrel bites into Ford’s skin.

_Two or three. Two or three. Two or three. Is there a bullet left?_

“Hold on now, I don’t think—”

“ _Three._ ”

_Holy shit._

His brain scrambles, searching for a solution, some way out of this.

He doesn’t think he could run across the room fast enough.

_He can’t remember if there’s a bullet. He can’t remember. He can’t._

There’s nothing he could throw in arm’s reach.

His fingers feel frozen stiff, still held in the air.

Ford made him swear to not tell a soul where the Journal was, no matter what.

_The world is at stake, Stanley. No single person is worth—_

_I didn’t know it would be **you** I’d have to—_

“ _Two._ ”

Ford would forgive him, right?

He’d see he had no other choice.

He’d understand.

~~He’d do the same, wouldn’t he?~~

He’d understand.

_Two or three? Two or three? Two or three? Two or—_

He thinks…

He thinks he remembers a third shot.

_He thinks… Drive. BANG. Swerve. BANG. BANG._

He thinks he remembers the third shot.

_Would you risk Ford’s life on a panicked guess?_

He _thinks_ he remembers the third shot.

He _thinks_ —

“ _One—_ ”

“ _In a tree about fifty yards from the house!_ ”

The words come out without his permission. But once they leave, it’s an avalanche, and he can’t stop them, everything just spilling out.

“There’s a low-growing branch and a line of claw marks in the bark. Under the snow, there’s a dry pocket in the roots. I covered it in leaves and wrapped it in plastic wrap, but it’s there, alright?”

He can almost feel Ford’s anger already.

Stan won’t even pretend to expect a “thank you” for saving his life.

He won’t even pretend to expect Ford to forgive him.

“That’s where I hid it. Now just put the gun down and _leave Ford alone._ ”

When the words finally stopped, his breathing is ragged and hitched, his chest tight.

His vision is blurry.

_He can’t lose Ford again._

_No matter the consequences._

Ford will have to live with it.

They can still figure this out.

Ford’s expression is frozen for a moment, yellow-tinted eyes seemingly glazed over, and Stan can barely will himself to suck in a trembling breath.

And then another.

And anoth—

His eyes blink, and then Bill is smiling at him again.

“Damn. Good on you idiots for using that concealment spell just long enough for you to hide it. Though I’d bet the aftereffects of that one were a _load_ of fun, huh?”

“We had a deal, Cipher,” Stan says. “I told you where it is. Put down the gun.”

“Oh, but you see,” Bill says, smiling stretching impossibly wider. “A deal isn’t a deal unless you shake on it.”

“You fucking bastard _put it_ —”

_Click._

Stan’s whole body jolts, time seeming to unwind impossibly slower and then grinding to a halt in the span of a millisecond as he registers what just happened.

As he realizes Bill just pulled the trigger.

The _click_ is somehow exponentially louder in his head, ringing and ricocheting inside his skull and tearing through everything else. An echo in a hollow chamber.

_He pulled the trigger anyways._

_And there was no—_

“Pleasure doing business with you, Pines.”

The empty gun clatters on the ground.

And Ford’s entire body goes limp.

* * *

He comes to with a splitting headache that reaches from one side of his temple to the other, white-hot pain concentrated behind his eye and pulsing with every heartbeat.

In his world, waking up at all means the worst has happened. And now it’s time to take stock and piece together whatever Bill’s madness entailed this time.

Ford slowly blinks his eyes open against harsh white light, his arms shaking as he pushes himself onto all fours from the cold, dirt floor. The room is quiet, his breathing eating into the silence and amplifying against the surrounding metal panels, all dull and asleep at the moment. He grabs onto the nearest one, fingers painfully stiff from the cold, and uses it to pull himself up onto unsteady feet, fighting through the immediate head rush and vertigo that follow. He groans, eyes shutting tight against the pain as he leans heavily on the panel, attempting to regain his bearings and wait for the moment to pass.

_No more blood than usual._

_No mysterious body aches or apparent pains aside from what makes sense._

_Portal is still off._

_Stanley is still—_

He pauses.

The last he remembers, Stanley was going to sleep for a few hours in the living room, and he was going to keep looking for another way to get rid of Bill. He thinks he remembers skimming some old text about magical barriers (he was pretty sure it was leading back to the unicorns again, but he had to be sure) and then…

He wonders how Bill managed to sneak past Stan, and why he came down here in the first place.

His head is still pounding, but it’s tolerable, so he moves off the panel and makes his way towards the elevator—

Something hard bumps against his foot and scratches on the ground, his entire body flinching.

He glances down and finds…

…

The elevator doesn’t move fast enough, not when his heart is slamming in his chest like cannon fire and every second feels like one wasted and _why did Bill have a gun where’s Stanley is he okay why did I have a gu—_

He can’t throw the gate open fast enough, taking the steps out of the basement two at a time even though his head feels like it’s about to explode and he stumbles over the last step and _where’s Stanley please don’t tell me Bill—_

His steps stop short in the doorway, and almost immediately his entire body sags against the doorframe in relief.

_He’s okay._

Stan, for better or worse, is sitting by the front door, his back against a bookshelf and his head in his hands, knees bent and drawing his legs closer to his body and fingers knotted in his hair, eyes wide open and distant, locked on some arbitrary spot on his legs.

He doesn’t look fine, not by a long shot. But he’s not lying in a puddle of his own blood, and that in and of itself lets Ford breathe again.

_He’s alive._

It’s another moment before he notices the red and gold-trimmed book by Stan’s side, and its presence sends his body completely rigid.

“What happened?” His voice is hoarse, but Stan’s fingers tightening in his hair tells him that he was heard. He takes a few steps out of the doorway, towards where Stan is sitting.

“We need to burn the pages, Ford. I can’t do that again.” It’s all he says, his words partially muffled in his hands, his fingers twisting tighter, eyes screwing shut. Ford glances back at the Journal again, the handwritten number “one” staring right back at him, igniting something just beyond annoyance in his blood.

He stops a few feet away from Stan, looking down at him.

“What. Happened.” Less of a question. A demand, now.

He feels like he already knows, but he has to hear Stan say it.

“I told him where I hid it,” he says. “He somehow got there before I could. The portal pages are gone.”

Ford curses under his breath.

“Stanley, why?” he implores. He tries to stamp down the anger in favor of getting more answers, but he feels it bubbling.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” Stan says dryly. “Or thank me. I know you won’t.”

“You handed him a third of the end of the world on a silver platter!” Ford exclaims. “Do you understand that, Stanley.”

“I don’t regret it.”

“Are you _kidding_? I told you how important this was. Why would you put the fate of the entire world at—”

“Because I thought he was going to kill you!” Stan snaps, his head flying bolt upright and startling Ford with a sudden intensity that borders on something dangerous and terrified, something he’s never seen on his brother’s eyes before. “He had a gun to your goddamn head, Ford! I couldn’t remember if there was another bullet in the fucking magazine or not!” His hands clench into fists. Unclench. Clench again. Something twists in Ford’s gut, something painful. He lets the annoyance burn it out instead. “What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to choose the rest of the universe!” Ford yells. “If he gets through that goddamn portal,” he jabs his finger behind him, “then that’s it. _That’s_ the end of the world, and then _everyone_ dies. You don’t get to choose _me_ over _that_!”

“And you don’t get to force me to make that choice!” Stan yells right back. “We could’ve burned those stupid pages _days_ ago, but you wouldn’t let me! This could have been all over but _you_ —”

“This doesn’t _end_ , Stan!” Ford yells, and Stan immediately falls quiet, staring up at him in stunned silence. “He’s in my damn head! We burn the pages, and he gets _mad_!  He’ll just keep toying with us and torturing me until he finally decides he’s done with us and gets rid of us! That’s how he operates! This doesn’t—” He hisses, pinching the bridge of his nose against the sudden sharp throb in his skull, his right eye burning in an unfortunately familiar way as what he’s sure is blood wells up and drips from the corner and down his cheek. He glances around for a napkin, but Stan catches his eye, holding up what looks like an old rag, his eyes wide and worried. Ford takes the rag and wipes the streak of blood, the momentary flash of anger fizzling out and just leaving him exhausted.

He can’t remember the last time he got more than three hours of sleep in one night.

His chest heaves a small sigh, and he dabs at his eye with the rag until he thinks the bleeding has stopped, handing it back to Stan’s waiting hand. His eyes lock on the Journal, and he’s not sure if it’s just because he doesn’t have the energy to meet his brother’s worried stare right now.

“This doesn’t end,” he says, softer now, eyes tracing over the signature handprint on the book’s cover. “Not like that. It’s not that easy.”

The silence permeates the room, the howling wind of the blizzard outside a white backdrop of noise, the house creaking softly with every gust. Ford reaches down and picks up the Journal, wiping off the dust from it’s back (slightly soggy, probably from the snow) and slipping it in his jacket pocket, his hands guiding it to the bottom.

The back of his finger grazes something down at the bottom. Something cold.

“I don’t even know if he knew it was empty,” Stan says into the silence.

It’s small and metallic and rounded to a tip with a flat back.

“It’s all just a game for him,” Stan says, “and just when I think I’ve figured out the rules—”

“He changes them.” Ford takes it out of his pocket, the bullet resting in his palm, glinting gold under the hallway lights.

He’s not sure what to make of its placement in his Journal pocket.

_On purpose or coincidence?_

_A threat? A joke?_

_A promise?_

Whatever the reason, he knows it’s probably not good. But it hardens something in him too, strengthens that will to finally put an end to Bill and his torment. To finally get rid of the sick bastard once and for all.

“He pulled the trigger anyways,” Stan says softly, almost like he’s afraid to say it aloud, like it will make it more real and not just the nightmare he probably wishes it was. “After I told him. He pulled the trigger anyways.”

“You said it yourself,” Ford says. “This is all just a game for him.” He clenches his fist around the bullet and then tosses it in Stan’s lap, turning away to head back to his study before he can see his twin’s reaction.

It’s over. In the past.

Now, he’s got work to do.

Best to just keep moving forward.

“And we had better start figuring out how to win it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the full link to the comic in case the link above doesn't work for you: http://shaxwn.tumblr.com/post/179659942648/i-was-stressed-the-other-day-and-this-is-how-i
> 
> I saw the comic the other day and just _immediately got the urge to write it oh my god_. Just so much *clenches fist* _Angst_... It was so damn fun to write, lemme tell you... Shout-out to [Shaxwn](http://shaxwn.tumblr.com/) for letting me write this! You rock!!!
> 
> Come check me out on [Tumblr](https://pinesbrosfalls.tumblr.com/)!


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